Web Application Framework

Are you wondering what is happening today with web related application development. Please read this whitepaper about the third wave.

The First Wave!

As in real life, computers and their software have cycles. The first cycle is always the most interesting and most difficult. As there is no reference with the past, this cycle is only for the brave or fanatic. Working with an unknown piece of software, you need trust in the product. This costs time and patience. Often new software is not of the best quality and needs a lot of fine tuning before it becomes stable enough to be used by less enlightened and more down to earth users. There are plenty examples of software which became famous and even market leaders because of the hard work of a group of enthusiastic users. Most time this software doesn't need big advertisement budgets to become well known. Recently we saw Napster get millions of users without a marketing or advertising budget.

The first wave of Internet came from universities and the American army. These two groups with a need of wide communication networks have used the Internet for a long time before the public ever became aware of it. The Internet was not user friendly but the users where smart enough to use the facilities.

The Second Wave!

The second wave came when someone saw the potential of a global network and started to build user-friendly browsers to use the net.  In the beginning, the most famous product was developed by Netscape. It now was possible for the public to use the facilities of that global network. Once the Internet was unlocked, millions of people started to use the net and within a few years the World-Wide-Web was the common place for all people who can handle a computer. It also became more and more became the initiator for groups of people who traditionally where not using a computer. The mail and chat facilities are products of such an impact for people who are online that it is hard to believe that they did not exist ten years ago. It is now common for grandparents to go online and enter a chat session to talk with there grandchildren.

Even the fax machine of twenty years ago was a revolution.  Currently, very few are using these old fashioned machines.  Most things you can do with a fax, can be done better and cheaper with the internet.

With the opening of the Internet to a wide audience, more and more new companies are founded to be part of the new and exiting world of WWW and dot.com. Young users of the Internet became developers of new software and within a few months, the manager and CEO of a very promising company. Looking back at it, the gold rush started with Netscape and spread around the world. Arrogant and overwhelmed by the success, people started to speak about the new economy. Traditional companies now where old fashion and where seen as dinosaurs that soon would have to leave to make a place for the new and more successful species of the dot.com. When famous banks started to lend money and also talk about the new economy, a new group of financial watchers were born. As it was not necessary to make a profit, complete new rules where invented to interpret the highs and lows of the new companies. In a short time, the WWW also became the WildWildWest. When the www mania started there was nothing, so there was plenty of room for initiatives like Amazon and Ebay. The fact they did not make any money let them set the rules of the new economics and a perfect choice to invest in those companies. People who had doubts about this kind of logic where the laugh at parties, when showing their concerns. You must be stupid not to see the big advantage of the new economy above the old one. The new economy can only go up, while the old economy can have a recession. Many famous and respected names from major financial institutions agreed with this and let the world know that it was a fact and we had to get used to it. No more recession.

Many investors these days know that it was a shameful mistake.

When it became clear that it was necessary to make a profit to survive, the glamour of the dot.com was gone and a very normal reaction was forthcoming. All the CEO's and managers who where calling "We need a web site, we don't care what it cost's" now stopped all web development. After the September 11 disaster, almost no web developers where hired. It seemed that the Internet was not the place for a decent company.

Like always, the unfounded optimism was wrong, but the new strategy was no better. Within a few months, billions of dollars were thrown away. Nobody wanted to get burned by something like the Internet. Now everybody knew that it was a bad investment to spend money on building web sites.

Fortunately a new group came up. The old economy like bank's and insurance companies now hired the best web architects and programmers for a fraction of the cost they had to pay a year ago. That was when the third wave of the Internet cycle began.

The Third Wave!

In the first and second wave of the Internet development, the need to be seen on the Internet was one of the strongest forces to start a web development project. As the Internet is used as a connecting medium, the choice of who is responsible for the web development often went to the communication department. The Internet was part of the business card of the company.

Most web sites are built with a language called HTML. HTML is a brain dead programming language.  It was never intended to be a programming language. HTML is a graphical description protocol.

So the limitations of HTML also dictated the definitive outcome of web sites. To be honest, most web sites are no more then an interactive advertisement of the company.

To make use of the endless possibilities of the Internet, a new way of programming the web application is needed. Now a wideband Internet connection is common all over the world, the need of proper applications becomes urgent. The reason it is not done on a wider scale as it happens today is very simple. The development cycle is too expensive. Web development usually costs 3 or 4 times more then traditional programming. Companies are not keen on spending much money to develop a web application. It's sad to see that there where unlimited financial backing for rubbish web sites that could do nothing more then pleases the CEO of the company. What we need now is smart management who get together with their staff and see what profit can be made with the use of the Internet. No longer web sites to show off, but web applications that can do the daily business routines utilizing the Internet. These kind of applications are the future of Internet related companies. The companies that fail to realize this will be the real losers in the near future.

When we look at web applications we see that banks and insurance companies are taking the lead. The money they will earn in the near future by letting the customers doing all the work on the Internet will be dramatic.

In any decent company there are processes which can be done on the Internet. Bookkeeping, flow control etc. These all should be driven by web applications. One of the reasons it has not happened on a large scale is the cost of this application. To overcome this handicap, WAF will be the solution. WAF, the Web Application Framework can be used to do rapid development without the drawback of unreadable and unmanageable code. A product like LCM can help the developer to create multiple lingual web applications in half the time of a more traditional programming project.

Programs like Frontpage or Dreamweaver can be used to build web applications, but have a big disadvantage. These programs dictate the way the code looks like. A small change in the generated code can be an option but the reality is that when you start to use such a generator you have to stick to it all the way. The limitation of the used product is also your limitation on the result.

With WAF, a web application programmer (WAP) can use the right tools to generate the bulk code and then is absolutely free to change it into what is necessary to the developed application.

The need to develop more WAF application becomes more and more urgent, as the lack of these applications will hold back the fast development of web applications.

Mike Cabolet is editor of Computer Watch Magazine and Web architect.
Any comment? Send an email to: Mike@Cabolet.com